You want questions, we got questions, says PETER CRAWLEY

Can I ask you something? If you come across a piece of writing that opens with a teasing enquiry, are you more inclined to read on? Does it stand apart from all the other boring articles or blurbs or ads that simply spit chewed-up facts in your face, never seeking your thoughts on the subject? Or does all the rhetoric get tiresome? Do you break under questioning?

Speaking of which, have you seen the programme for Absolut Fringe? Were you, like me, happy to find that it is smaller than a barn door yet bigger than an amoeba, and that you can actually read it under conventional lighting without the aid of cryptographers or gel filters?

But were you secretly relieved that some things never change? Doesn't that thicket of open- ended verbiage make every show sound more thrillingly opaque than the last? For instance, how do the following titles grab you? Apocalypse When? Who Is Fergus Kilpatrick? Where Did It All Go Right? The Value of Art?In this series of leading questions doubling as show titles, does a performance that pivots between query and statement such as Pregnant?! properly qualify?

Isn't it encouraging that even the most uncontroversial assertion can be spun into uncertainty? "Dance is dance", begins the blurb for On the Wall, unequivocally: or is it? Isn't it rather sweet, too, that DubLindy's write-up make flattering rhetorical assumptions about us? Are you hep to the jive? Do you even need to ask? But have other programme descriptions become dizzy with their own interrogation?

What is the best way to respond to something that opens with the words, “Jewel theft or homosexuality??” Are those our only options? Is this line of inquiry excessive? In 100 carefully chosen words, designed to inform and intrigue, how many questions are enough? Is two sufficient? Is three pushing it?

If so, does that make Victor and Gord Cubed, The Crown Jewels, Manchán Magan's Broken Croí/ Heart Briste(Is it in Irish? Can language be a weapon? Who the feic knows?), Mirari's T he Infant(is it a plan for world destruction or the scribbles of a four-year- old boy?) and The Performance Corporation's Power Point(why is it so hard to know anything anymore?) seem more confused than suggestive?

Incidentally, has Home for the Bewildered, whose blurb for a project called Angry Schoolasks no fewer than 11 questions in just four lines, set some kind of inquisitive record? Is it revealing that so many artists look like they can't find a question mark without basing a show around it?

Is art, or an idea, no longer easy to distinguish from a standard sales pitch? Or, with an ever more information-addled, seen-it- all-before audience, who express themselves in status updates and direct tweets, does art now thrive by creating a cloud of mystery?

When a show is still inchoate and fuzzy with promise and the marketing department calls up looking for copy, do companies simply match every question with 11 of their own? Or is it something inherent in art? Has it ever claimed to have all the answers? Or should it just ask the right questions?

You tell me.